


you had your soul with you

by angelica



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, I just love these two so much, Praise Beebo, but here we are, real life marrieds, who knew one day i'd actually like ray palmer enough to write fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-24 04:59:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18564415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelica/pseuds/angelica
Summary: Nora Darhk did unspeakable things to bring her father back to life, only to meet her match in the optimism of Ray Palmer. She gets to know him through letters, she gets to be near him while hiding, she falls in love with him while fighting for their lives.





	you had your soul with you

**Author's Note:**

> Here we are. I have had the first 500 words of this story on a notepad since early December, but only today wrote 800 more words to finish the first chapter. As you can see in my tags, who would have known one day I'd actually write something involving Ray Palmer. Praise Beebo for Legends being the show where annoying characters become wonderful and get to interact in wonderful ways with their real life spouses. 
> 
> Hope you all enjoy this. I am following the show pretty closely for the moment, but if I can manage in time, we are going to have some canon divergence.
> 
> Title from The National.

The first words came out almost out of her validation under the haze of the rosé wine still in her veins, having spent the entire day opening up to women she barely knew, tickled by his attempt at chivalry. He had brushed off the fact that he could have been lost forever if Ava had discarded the letter like she intended to, and the blank notepad Mona had left behind had been too tempting.

Her handwriting was a little rusty, her fingers shook a little. _I always wanted a pen pal_ , she wrote. The orphanages had been too strict to appease her with the simplest pleasures and the death cult she had been tricked into joining refused her contact with the outside world. She finally had a potential pen pal who she hoped would never attempt to get stuck in the glue of the envelope again.

His response was quick. He promised not to sneak himself in again via letters and instead took his time to introduce himself like they were meeting for the first time. Given she had been possessed by a demon when they first met, he had a point, they were meeting for the first time with a fresh slate.

He talked about growing up in Ivy Town with a single mother and a brother who loved to compete with him in everything. Even in different eras and completely different circumstances, they had a common theme in their respective childhoods. They had been lonely, her as an orphan surrounded by strangers and him with a loving family who didn’t understand him well. They also both liked musicals.

She didn’t enjoy talking about her experiences in the orphanages and her first encounter with the Shrouded Compass. She definitely wanted to avoid the subject of becoming Mallus’ vessel. Yet somehow, she found it easy to mention them in passing to him. _I want to spoil things from the future to you just to annoy you_ , she wrote a week later, _but we already broke time once and no need for a redo. Besides, the future is my past and I am repenting for it_.

 _I like the here and now_ , was his response. She kept that letter in her pocket as a reminder.

One time, as a joke, she wrote that she had a thing for mustaches based on her time spent in Victorian London. His reply came with a photo enclosed, showing him with a mustache, he wrote, Gideon grew synthetically for him. She realized, once again, that he was too good for her and instead wrote that she changed her mind. His next photo came of him clean-shaven, just as the way she had grown to like him.

He mostly wrote about things from his adventures with the Legends in great detail, making her feel like she was a part of the journey. He talked about newer and stranger magical beings trying to wreak havoc on the timeline. She wrote she was done being a magical being trying to wreak havoc herself and offered tips about the beings she knew about. Good earplugs worked against banshees and djinns were not to be messed with. Contrary to popular belief, werewolves were fine with silver. He was thankful for the insider information.

She wrote about the different types of food Mona brought her to expand her culinary horizons and ignored his suggestions to ask for butter in her morning coffee. She did enjoy the chocolate chip cookies he sent her through Mona.

If she really thought about it, she barely knew him, had spent too little time in his company. The longest time they had spent time together, she had been his captor and they were in a different country decades ago. Yet she knew how nice and gentle he was, how he had tried to help her time and time again, how he had literally saved her life, giving her a second chance in life, to try to be a better person.

Through the letters, she grew to know the person he was deep down. He could be optimistic to an annoying degree, but it was his optimism that had pushed him through difficulties he had faced in life. Besides competing against a brother who loved to show off how he was better in everything, he had struggled to fit in growing up, but refused to lose hope.

His optimism had helped him in the face of losing a fiancée, even though his response to her death for a while was to fight against vigilantes. He had described his fiancée to her in such detail through his words that Nora felt like she knew her and mourned the undeserved death of a woman she never got the chance to meet. She could not blame him for going after vigilantes to rather avenge Anna’s death when she herself had done unspeakable things under the influence of Mallus to bring her father back to life. She was glad that he had become the ATOM though, even though seeing him in his miniature form was hilarious to her. Him being ordained to marry people was even funnier.    

He had become humble after realizing that life had moved on during his absence after the explosion at Palmer Tech without anyone really looking for him. He had learned that it was more important to choose every day to do good instead of trying to constantly show off to others that he was better than them. Even if she refused to admit it, he was inspiring.

She also refused to admit that the Rebecca Silver books Mona got her hooked on were inspiring her, making her think that maybe it was possible to see a life beyond the time prison she was in. Her prison cell, with its few pieces of furniture she didn’t like the style of was her present for the unforeseen future with Mona, sometimes Gary and Ava, and his letters being her only links to the outside world. She had committed so many sins she needed to pay for and being under the influence of a demon was not an excuse if she wanted to become the person Ray thought she could be. Yet as she finished one Rebecca Silver book after another, she laid down to think of a future she could have one day.

She knew there was trouble when she didn’t hear from Ray for a few days and Gary sought out her help. She hadn’t seen Mona either in a while and knew that something was happening in the Time Bureau. She had heard of prisoners being taken out of their cells at random times of the day. When Gary offered to take her out of hers, she didn’t hesitate, just because she wanted to help. She didn’t want to escape, didn’t want to be on the run again.

Feeling whatever mystical being that entered Hank’s office as she hid under the table felt like the first time she felt Mallus’ presence: chilling. She was scared for being tempted to get under its influence and use dark magic again, felt scared for Gary’s life. She tried to block the feelings as much as she could, but only after the being left she felt like herself. She needed to be away, in the safety of her cell, which sounded like an oxymoron. She made Gary promise to keep himself safe.

When she felt the presence again hours later, she was scared again, but this time scared that someone was in grave danger. A surge of power she had never felt before coursed through her veins as she screamed for someone, anyone to help her, to help her get out, to let her help whomever was being threatened by the being. She didn’t even realize she had somehow absorbed the power of her cell until she was running to where Hank’s office was.

She had been too late. Just as she had been too late to save her father as a little girl, just as she had been too late to realize how wrong her father had been before following all the wrong paths. She had been too late to use her second chance to become the person Ray thought she could be, the person she wanted to be.

As she stared at him, unable to form words, she couldn’t blame Nate for thinking that she had murdered his father. She didn’t want it, yet she had no choice but to go on the run again.

The only thing she had on her besides the prison jumpsuit on her back when she made it out of the Time Bureau was Ray’s letter in her pocket.


End file.
